sex

When I was learning about stranger danger, people were so vague with descriptions like "saying things that make you uncomfortable", "touching you in a way that makes you uncomfortable", and "talking about sex" that I thought that:

A) Any stranger who accidentally scared you or tried to hug you when you didn't want a hug, etc was bad news, and...

B) It was illegal to tell a child how babies were made unless you were their parent or teacher.

I learnt about genetics when I was, like, nine, but didn't learn about porn until way later, so I used to think that if something was X-rated, it was for women (which was why a little boy might get in trouble watching an X-rated movie).

When I was at intermediate age, I thought the penis and vagina when I had puberty classes back in the day were a puzzle. Connecting one piece to another. When I grew up at college I knew that sex was a thing that parents do when they get married. I now know that God has made sex a beautiful thing between a husband and wife.

Matthew

I am a male-to-female transgender. When I was a boy, I felt mostly like a girl, and I thought everyone was tricking me into thinking I was a boy because my mother wanted a son instead of a daughter. I thought this was the reason of why my hair grew so fast (I thought this was why girls usually have longer hair) and that everyone was born with a penis, but in women it disappeared during teenage. Saddly, I grew up and was proven wrong...

Aurore

I thought that sex was when two people put on the same pair of pants, one person in each leg. Needless to say, weight loss commercials were absolutely scandalous.

Mickey

top belief!

So when I was a kind, any time something sexual happened in a movie or tv show they would play that jazzy saxophone music. So my brain just associated the sound of a jazzy saxophone with sex and any time a song got jazzy I would blush and get embarrassed and say the song was nasty and to turn it off because that's how my mom acted when something sexual happened in a movie. Weird right? I still get weirdly uncomfortable when I hear a saxophone getting jazzy.

This is more of my understanding of relationships than anything sexual. For the longest time I really thought that cheating wasn't possible. I thought it simply didn't happen, that no one ever pursued two people at once. But then I learned that people do that and it felt so weird. I couldn't wrap my head around it. Why would you need two people? To this day, I can't ever see myself cheating or understand why people do that.

Okay so this is more about sexuality in general than any particular part of sex. I am and always have been a bisexual and when I was little I thought everyone was. I thought it was really a common thing. That we could all have crushes on both genders but there was some kind of secret deal that society had made, that we'd all keep those feelings of love and attraction for same sex a secret because it didn't make babies. I thought everyone just ignored their feelings for people of the same gender because we all wanted to have kids when we were older. But I didn't mind the idea of not having kids so I told a girl I liked her. She told everyone and they made fun of me, but that only encouraged the theory that they were all hiding the same thing and they were just mad that I wasn't following their rules. Because of this, and the fact that I was bullied so much for it, I decided I would follow those rules and I pushed all those feelings I had for girls deep down inside. It wasn't until I was eighteen that I finally came out of the closet and accepted my feelings for same sex. To this day, I still feel embarrassed when I find myself attracted to a beautiful woman.

The odd one out

We had these cheap anatomy books that had always sat on the bookshelves. I once dug through them at 6-8 and read through (or stared at thr pictures) the whole chapter on reproduction, pregnancy, the whole nine yards. I was young and NONE OF IT made sense to me. I did however come to believe that Organisms were big living things and Orgasms were smaller living things. I still looked at those words that way for the majority of my childhood...

Lydia

As a young girl who grew up with brothers, I of course saw them take a bath or get a diaper change, so I knew they had different genitals right off the bat. When my mom became pregnant, she also explained, very vaguely, that it took a boy and a girl to make a baby and then mommy carried it in her tummy until it was ready to be born. You'd think that would tell me enough to put two and two together and figure out the actual act but for years I didn't have a clue. I knew it took a penis and a vagina, but as far as I knew, neither of those parts could do anything but pee. I didn't know about erections, or that my body was supposed to fit anything inside it, so I figured that when a girl and boy were ready to have a baby, they got naked, they snuggled and then the boy peed on her. Hey I was pretty darn close if you think about it!

Confused Little girl

I used to believe that sex was only done in the hospital, and doctors would watch as the couple had sex. I believed this until I was 13.

top belief!

When I was little I thought girls had "man parts" as well, but it just took longer for them to grow.

person

top belief!

When I was around nine I shared a room with my older sister and my parents room was next door.I noticed that when we had gone to bed I could hear a lot of water running from my parents bathroom.Obviously they were brushing their teeth, ect but ny sister said it really meant they were having sex! The idea was that sex was so messy they kept having to leap up and wash their hands each time they touched the "nasty parts".When the water stopped, they were finished.I imagined them jumping up and running in the bathroom over and over ...

Bathroom buddies

top belief!

When I was 10, I heard the term red light district and thought ithat anyone who had a red light in front of thier house must be a prostitute!My friend and I used to yell there's another one!When we saw a red light one someone's front porch/garden We were were amazed at the number of supposed prostitutes in our own neighborhood! One house was owned by a very old lady who lived alone, and we were in the car with my mom when we saw her go in with an equally old man with a walker.I said to my friend. that I guess Mrs. Jones had to go back to "her old profession" because her husband had died.My mom asked what on earth was I talking about. I said, knowingly about the red light and what that always meant.The implication was so ridiculous that it took her awhile to get what I meant, but let's just say that before the evening was over, I and my friend were straightened out.Boy did I feel dumb!

The ex jr. Vice squad

In high school, like until I was 17, I knew gay men had a variety of ways they had sex. I did not, however, understand what scissoring was in terms of lesbian sex. I just thought there was mostly hand activity involved. I was also a very politically literate kid (contradictory, I know) and was very concerned with the problem of female genital mutilation in many countries. So at lunch one day one of my girl friends made a joke about scissoring and I was SO FURIOUS at her that she would make a joke about such a completely terrible thing that was done to women and girls. She explained to me what scissoring really was and I was mortified at my mistake.

Also, when I was in 3rd grade, I sort of had a generic understanding that sometimes people had something called sex and sometimes that made babies. But I really had no idea what the word sex meant at all. So I overheard some of the bigger kids at school talking about their friend and said she was bumping and grinding with her boyfriend and they got pregnant. I was confused and decided it must mean that if a boy bumps into you and sort of rubs against you as you walk past, even on accident, that must be what sex really was. So later that week, a boy bumped into me, brushed past, and I fell down. Went home in tears because I was sure I was pregnant. Told mom a boy bumped and grinded me and now I was pregnant. She started crying because she thought something terrible happened to me, and asked me to tell her exactly what happened. I did, and she started to laugh which scared me more. She then said that was just an expression for sex and had nothing to do with someone bumping into you. Still didn't understand what sex was but was happy I couldn't do it by accident. Got the talk officially a few weeks later when I walked in on her and dad.

Until I was 8 I thought that people could only kiss if they were married. I thought actors in movies who weren't married in real life wore fake lips to kiss. I spent so much time wondering how they got fake lips to look so real

Dana

When I was 9 or 10, I overheard my sisters making fun of lesbians and I asked what they were. My sister said that they were people from the country of Lesbos. I got really angry because it didn't seem right to make fun of someone because of where they came from!